Intel's Whiskey Lake Notebook Chip Launches, Emphasizing Connectivity This Time Around

Expect only modest performance gains over last years model, as Intel unveils yet another generation of 14nm Intel Core processors for notebooks.

- Mark Hachman

While Intel’s new Whiskey Lake and Amber Lake mobile Core chips differ from their predecessors mainly in terms of available boost speed (go. pcworld.com/bspd), Intel’s marketing spin will emphasize something else: an “optimized for connectivity” tagline in marketing materials for notebooks and tablets sold with these new 8th-gen U- and Y-series chips.

Rather than pitch the new processors as simply faster, Intel’s messaging will emphasize the Gigabit Wi-Fi connectivity Intel built into its six new chips. That may be because Intel’s chips are simply becoming harder to tell apart. These new 14nm Core chips are essentially the third iteration of the original Skylake 14nm processor, though Intel has shipped 14nm chips since 2014’s Broadwell generation.

Here’s the number that matters, though: Intel is promising that Whiskey Lake/Amber Lake will deliver a 10-percent generational improvement in performance on the most recent Kaby Lake-R 8th-gen chips, and that Whiskey Lake is half again as fast as a 7th-generation Core chip.

The story behind the story: Intel’s marketing follows a consistent pattern: When the company’s CPU trounces the competition, you’ll hear a lot of noise around clock speed, cores, and performance. When Intel’s less sure of itself, talk turns to platform-level improvements. In 2000, when Transmeta thrust low-power microprocessors into the spotlight, Intel’s Centrino messaging was all about its combination of processor, chipset, and wireless. Intel isn’t feeling quite the same pressure from AMD, but the emphasis on Wi-Fi is a tell it’s still sensitive.

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